Windows 10 Tip: Cerebro is a great Apple Spotlight alternative for Windows 10

Apple’s Spotlight is a great feature on Mac OS and iOS. It lets you easily search for things on your computer, as well as the web. Windows 10’s Search that’s built into Cortana is also pretty good when it comes to search, but it isn’t flawless and sometimes the search results aren’t really accurate.

Meet Cerebro, a new app for Windows 10, and other older versions of Windows that brings an Apple Spotlight-like experience to Windows. I’ve been using the tool for the past few days and it really is awesome. Once you download and install the tool, all you need to do is hit Ctrl + Spacebar and it will open up. From there, you can search for anything you want — so for instance, if you want to open Spotify, you can simply search for the app and hit enter to open it up. Searching for applications on Cerebro isn’t its best feature because it currently can’t find Windows Store apps which might be annoying if you heavily depend on the modern Windows Store apps.

But what makes Cerebro so great is the fact that you can install plugins to expand its functionality. At the moment, there are nearly 60 plugins for Cerebro and almost all of them are pretty awesome. Ther’s a plugin that lets you search for questions on Stackoverflow and get the answers right on the Cerebro window, for instance. And if you’re a GIF-lover, there’s a plugin that lets you search for GIFs on Giphy directly from Cerebro. There’s a lot of other plugins for Cerebro, including one to see the weather for a particular city, one for IMDB, Twitter, and even Reddit.

Cerebro isn’t perfect by any means, the experience is a bit rough and the plugins sometimes don’t work properly. But Cerebro is still in its early stages of development, and if you want to help make it better, you can do so via GitHub as it’s an open source project.